OLD - On the topic of loneliness - 2021-01-16

Loneliness is a hard one, and something I believe everyone struggles with. I also believe that it’s one of the driving forces in our lives, being so strong as to either trump our passions or giving birth to despair if a solution cannot be found. It’s also pretty hard to define, as it manifests in so many of the things we do and concepts we have, sometimes paradoxically simultaneously. There’s for example the common form of physical loneliness, which I’d describe as simply being the physical manifestation of the underlying feeling. The concrete implication of this viewpoint is the fact that you can be lonely while surrounded by friends, or utterly content while being alone. In some way or another this becomes a numbers game for most, the more people you interact with the higher are the chances that you’ll meet someone you’ll connect with. It might not be obvious what this means, but it’s a very intuitive feeling when you meet someone and you really understand each other. I have a very graphical understanding of this which I’ll try to put into words.

Imagine the world as being an infinitely dimensional space, and each point being a consciousness with its position in respect to the subjective perspective that consciousness has on the world. Infinitely dimensional, because the factors to take into account are infinitely many. Either way, we all lie in this space somewhere, and sometimes we meet someone who are close to us. They see things in the same way that we do, in regards to the factors we focus on and obviously shrouded by our own veil of subjectivity. That feeling, I think, is one of the deepest and ultimately happiest (can a feeling be happy?) feelings there are. Unfortunately, these connections are extremely fragile as a consequence of being affected by the physical world. Because we cannot (broadly speaking) perceive the connections as they really are, or rather what they “really are” is exactly how we perceive them, simple things like our focus changes the connection. That’s not even taking into account things like time and the fact that we’re constantly moving in this “perspective” space, constantly changing how we view the world both in a deep way with our understanding of the world, and the shallow way where we simply follow our emotions. Keep in mind that all these changes are on both sides of the connection, and things become extremely complex. There’s also the minuscule problem of not being able to communicate properly, the only way being by transforming a thought into words, which is an extremely lossy conversion, and then having the receiver do the same thing in the opposite direction, filling in the loss in transmission with their own subjective view of what they think you meant. This is an interesting topic for another time though, right now it’s all to say that connections to other people are inherently fragile and limited, which isn’t a very comforting fact. There’s two main manifestations of this phenomena that I want to discuss, one being the personal (often romantic) connection to another person, and the other being the broader societal connection to the culture at large.

The personal connection is the true tragedy, but also the one more prone to happen. Sometimes we meet someone, and there’s a real connection, a mutual feeling of true understanding. And it’s like nothing else matters anymore, because you’re no longer lonely. The burden you carry your entire life, the burden of being human, is suddenly shared, and it’s like the sun is shining for the first time. No wonder we get attached to these feelings. Along the way, something happens. Often enough we start to unravel factors that we hadn’t seen before, and you start to drift apart as you gain more understanding of the other persons perspective and realize how you weren’t even that close to begin with. And this is the deception of the focus, because your focus isn’t just what you currently attach importance to, but it actually has a physical effect. Shifting your focus is the thing that makes you drift apart in this case, it’s not like what it might initially look like that you weren’t ever close. This unraveling, broadening your focus and thus drifting apart, is the common tragedy. It’s the one where deepening your connection actually destroyed it. It’s the one where you might say “it wasn’t meant to be”. Sometimes though, this isn’t what happens. You find that deepening the connection actually deepens it, and you become closer by doing so instead of drifting apart. These are the ones where you might think that it’ll last forever, either as a life-long friend or in marriage. In contrast to the other type, this is because broadening your focus just made you closer, just made you find more factors in common. We tend to forget though, that everything changes with time. That’s not to say that every connection is bound to self-destruct (well, they are because we’re mortal), but rather that we’re lazy or simply unaware of the fact that connections require maintenance. People change with time, and the connection need to change in accordance with that in order to last. In other words, you need to work on changing together instead of alone. Otherwise you’ll quickly find that your view of the other person doesn’t match up with reality anymore, because you’ve been so busy keeping up with your own change that you’ve missed the other person changing, and thus the connection lies in the past. If the other one was the common tragedy, then this is the rare one. The one that sneaks up on you, the one that happens so subtly that you don’t notice it and suddenly you find yourself 15 years into a marriage where you resent each other. And you miss how it used to be, you miss yourself and you miss the other person. Because even if you meet each other all the time physically, you both feel lonely. And it doesn’t seem like there’s any way out really, because you’ve both attached so many ideas to the other person that aren’t really there, it’s even worse than starting from scratch. But because we’re afraid, we cling to how it used to be, thinking that the past somehow redeems the present. And as we all know all too well, life gets complicated. Maybe there’s a kid there, or maybe you work together, or maybe.. There’s all these things that we attach importance to that gets in the way, and instead of trying to solve the problem around these things we simply use them as an excuse because we’re afraid of change. Ultimately, we might be miserable but at least it’s a known misery. There’s a comfort in that, because you can simply tune off and follow the pattern. This, I think, is an all too common way that people stop living. Not that they die in the physical sense, but they go from being alive to simply living. Just turning on autopilot and becoming one with the patterns, limiting their consciousness as much as possible to avoid the pain. This is the true scope of what I mean by tragedy, the soul-crushing event that a lot of people never make it through. The one where the feeling of loneliness becomes so much to bear that the only option you see out is to stop feeling altogether. Just the though is enough to drive me to tears honestly.

Imagine it yourself. You meet a person, and you develop a real connection, and suddenly there’s two. There’s beauty in the world again, because there’s someone to share it with. Eventually there’s hardship, but you work it out together because you trust each other. But then slowly things happen, and your focus start to wander away from the relationship. It’s subtle at first, like how you no longer tell each other everything. It’s so subtle in fact, that you don’t even notice that you’ve drifted apart until you one day remember how it used to be. That memory might even be enough for a revival, a resurgence of your relationship. That might last for a while, maybe for a long time even because you’re so afraid of drifting apart again. But then something drastic happens, and you start to drift apart again. The next time you remember how it used to be, it’s with sadness. You might think that if you can’t make something that felt that good last, then how will anything ever last? As this thought dawns on you, the reality of the situation sets in. The realization that nothing lasts, combined with the feeling of loneliness, is enough to destroy the best of us. It’s so utterly overwhelming that you numb yourself, internally (through the mind) or externally (through drugs), and you slowly become less and less of a person. Seeing yourself like that, like a shell of what you used to be, even if you could manage to become more conscious again you wouldn’t want to, because the only thing you’d have to be conscious of is the pain.

Putting aside that personal, painful tragedy, there’s the broader cultural one happening simultaneously. I’m discussing these things as if they existed in a vacuum, but obviously they affect each other. The cultural connection is much more complex in a sense, because it’s happening on a broader scale. It’s like, viewing society as one conscious we’re discussing the dissonance within itself rather than what comes more natural to us, which is connections to other people. Anyways, viewing society from the perspective of loneliness its most vital function is establishing a common ground. Taking the graphical description I used earlier, our community is supposed to bring us closer together (which is what we say), they’re supposed to make us understand each other and share each others perspectives. In more critical terms, this is the conforming function of society. Put in this way though, it actually makes sense. We need to have a mutual understanding of the world to interact, to cooperate. Obviously this comes with its problems, but it’s the only way in which a (larger) society could work. Thus, the increasing alienation people are feeling today is something I would describe as a grave societal failure. Everything is moving too fast, and society moves very slowly in comparison and can’t really keep up. As a consequence, the common ground that is supposed to be established hasn’t, which is one of the reasons why loneliness is such a prevailing feeling today. Another reason, which is slightly off-topic, is the (in my opinion) absurd focus on individualism in western society. Honestly I got really into the description of personal connections and can’t really let it go, so I think this is all I’ll have to say right now.